Listening for God in all things
Last time I spoke to you about the people who succeeded Pelagius and for whom the Celtic way of seeing the world made sense. I spoke to you of St. Ninian and how he organized the church in a way that reflected more of the Eastern Church tradition rather than the Western Church. I reflected on the great hymns of St. Patrick whose sense of God in all of creation created a world view in which God and our faith could not be separated from any aspect of our life. Then I spoke to you of John Scotus the Irishman who saw in the Celtic way an important contribution to the wider faith community and sought to bring that contribution into the mainstream of the church.
While he wasn’t successful in that, the Celts doggedly refused to give up on the path that had guided their ancestors through life and had kept them firmly rooted in God and in Jesus Christ. Even when the last old Celtic monastic bastion on Iona had been converted to a more Roman structure and the worship and life of the community altered, Culdee chapels continued to dot the landscape of the outer reaches of Scotland. The Culdees were Celtic monks in the eremitic tradition – namely, people chose to live a relatively secluded prayer-focused life. They banded together in loosely structured monastic clusters and continued to teach and lead the people in the ways that they had come to love and cherish. And while visible signs of the Celtic spirituality disappeared from public view, it found its home among the people of the Western Isles.
In the middle of the 19th century, a young civil servant named Alexander Carmichael began to record the prayers that had been passed down for centuries in the oral tradition of the Hebrides and the west coast of Scotland.
While outwardly the people were part of the modern parish system, in their daily life they continued to pray the prayers handed down to them through the generations. These prayers were usually sung or chanted and were recited as a rhythmic accompaniment to the people’s daily routine – at the rising of the sun and its setting, at the kindling of a fire in the morning and its covering at night. These prayers were used in the most ordinary contexts of daily life and not within the four walls of a church on Sunday. Carmichael detected in many of them a liturgical character and tone and came to believe that they had come down from the tradition of the old Celtic Church – the chanting being reminiscent of its ancient music. Evidently the people could not be convinced to let these prayers fade away. They had been taught that the light of God was in them and that the goodness of creation was all around them and that heaven and earth were bound together. If you have ever traveled to the western isles, you know how conscious you need to be of the sky, the sea and all that surrounds you.
The prayers that Carmichael collected are known as the Carmina Gadelica which means the songs and poems of the Gaels. These poems celebrate the goodness of creation. Even though they knew that the elements could be harsh, they believed that the grace of God was to be found in a love for all the elements that surrounded them. They even believed that the grace of healing was contained within the creation. They viewed the life of God as being deep within creation as well as being distinct from it. For them God is present in the elements but God is not the creation. They understood that there is a distinction between the Creator and the creation, between the Source of life and living things. And while they didn’t confuse the Creator and the creation, they held a great reverence for creation while not defying it. One of the customs of the people was for men to take off their cap to the sun in the morning and for women to bend their knee to the moon at night. As an old woman at Barra explained it: It is a matter for thankfulness, the golden-bright sun of virtues giving us warmth and light by day, and the white moon of the seasons giving us guidance and leading by night. It was noted that many of the prayers moved like the shuttle on a loom, between the physical and the spiritual giving thanks for the material gift of light while at the same time being aware of the spiritual light of God within creation. (Listening for the Heartbeat of God, p. 44)
God is present at the heart of creation, God is the heartbeat of life but God is also close. There is a personal immediacy of God to us, a closeness not only of God but of the whole host of heaven, enfolding the Earth and its people with love. But this is no sentimental piety. There exists in these prayers a readiness to give and receive warm affection for Christ, the saints and angels. The saints and angels were real to the people and viewed as being present throughout life. They are regarded as messengers of God’s everlasting love for us.
Remember that I told you about the Celtic belief that the image of God can be seen in newborns? Well they also practised what is known as the birth baptism. Three drops of water would be placed on the child’s forehead to acknowledge that the image of the God of life had been born into the world. They would still have the child baptized in the church but it could take months for a priest to come to the more remote parts.
The Celtic belief that we have the light of God within us and that we are to pray for that light to shine through all that clouds and covers it over remained strong. They looked for God’s grace in their life to enable them to become more loving, wiser, more like Christ; but they never denied their need to be protected from evil. They were very aware of the existence of evil and the need constantly to guard against it.
The more formal repression of the old spirituality began in the 16th century with the Reformation. Along with this went the suppression of the Gaelic tongue which was still widely spoken in the Western Isles and the highlands. Its suppression bears resemblance to the manner in which our own indigenous peoples saw the suppression of their language and culture. As people shared with Carmichael, they often preferred to do it in the quiet of the night or they would follow him to the next village to avoid any suspicion that they were speaking of the forbidden ways.
Philip Newell, the author of the book on which these messages are based wonders what was it that the establishment so feared in this stream of spirituality? Was it in part that people of such a spirituality could not be neatly controlled or confined within the narrow bounds of religion and order as defined by the established Church and society of the day?
In the end what really caused the old ways to die the most was the Highland Clearances of the first half of the 19th century. With no central place to be able to keep the tradition strong, the scattering of the clans and the families gradually led to fewer and fewer people remembering and following that old path. Carmichael’s work captured what would soon have been lost to the dust of history. But because of his work, the beauty of that old way of seeing found a new life and enables to not only know how they viewed the world and their faith in God but be able to choose that path for ourselves.
One last thing to share today and that is their perspective on death. All through their life they sought for the light of God as they listened for the heartbeat of God in all things. But death was a place of dark sorrow that was difficult to cross. But while the light seemed to fade, they believed that the angels of God would guide them over to a goodness of unimaginable glory. But rather than seeing this goodness as unrelated to the present world, they saw it as a continuation of the goodness experienced here in creation and in the earth’s cycles of seasons. To them it was a return to the very heart of the seasons, to the Source of all creation, a returning to the One who is the heart of all life. I will end with a prayer which was said at the deathbed of a loved one that speaks of the depth of hope found in this tradition and speaks not just to the one who is facing death at that moment, but to the people as a whole and to all of creation:
Thou goest home this night to thy home of winter,
To thy home of autumn, of spring, and of summer;
Thou goest home this night to thy perpetual home,
To thine eternal bed, to thine eternal slumber……
The great sleep of Jesus, the surpassing sleep of Jesus,
The sleep of Jesus’ wound, the sleep of Jesus’ grief,
The young sleep of Jesus, the restoring sleep of Jesus,
The sleep of the kiss of Jesus of peace and of glory……
The shade of death lies upon thy face, beloved,
But the Jesus of grace has His hand round about thee;
In nearness to the Trinity farewell to thy pains,
Christ stands before thee and peace is in His mind.
Sleep, O sleep in the calm of all calm,
Sleep, O sleep in the guidance of guidance,
Sleep, O sleep in the love of all loves;
Sleep, O beloved, in the Lord of life,
Sleep, O beloved, in the God of life!